Thursday, 26 January 2012

How I admire dogs
who share their happiness
with each other by wagging their tails
-sniffs to follow.
How unlike the human
wagging of tongues to form
words with which we tell others
'ignore my body language
and four of your five senses'.

Team games always
have sides, winners
and leaders-usually
men who subordinate
others by becoming a side,
in themselves, like
corporations who rule
the rules they take
the openness of game
away from the unwary.

Saturday, 21 January 2012

If Atheism ever developed
into a worldwide self-founded
movement which fundamentally
rewrote the older languages
and myths developed around
by then-discarded religions-
in winning the rhetorical battle
how, without being absolutist itself,
would it then describe it's absolutism
as a self-ascribed Liberal Diversity?

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

television and cheap alcohol-
the surest way to create a
mass disinterest in literature,
mass illiteracy, poor spelling
and mass attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder.
What better way to build
in obsolescence to intelligence?.

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

was asked 'Is sex dirty?'
after trying to look sheepish
he replied 'Yeah, if it is good'.
I admire religions of dirt,
where the faith is brewed
in secret, like poitin,
and it renews in the imbiber
equal measures of both
melancholy and passion.

Monday, 16 January 2012

"Organised religions create holiness,
canonize it and institutionalize it
in order that they can then use it
as a truncheon with which to herd
their little sheep into the slavery of dogma.
Opposed to that are poetry
and the imagination to create fantasia,
which open the gates to freedom."
-Jan Svankmajer, 1999

Sunday, 15 January 2012

When I was about seven or eight
I wanted to write and paint-
at home, rather than in school,
where it was done by rote.
I asked for the materials
to do just that. I had grand
ideas about self expression.

The paper offered left me
no room to write, and would
never be thrown away.
The gift of a painting book
engaged at first sight,
until I saw the thick black lines
that outlined characters
from Dickensian melodramas,
lines which watched for my error
and my choice of colour.
I was meant to shade in the blocks
within the lines.

The book drained Dickens' characters
of their natural life and danger.
Being watched took the life
away from my mind.
Whatever I thought to draw
the black lines trapped me,
as if what I saw in my head
I could not draw
-the lines were prison bars
which broke up distant landscapes.

I soon gave up, as long as
I seemed more grateful than
passive my watchers thought
it fine. Creativity always had
to lose to manufacturing.

Monday, 9 January 2012

who turned 65 yrs old yesterday.
To fill their pages the press reran
all his greatest publicity hits.
He did nothing:
the best illusionists know when to stop,
the better to leave behind a good impression.

Liberace is proof that if you fake sincerity well enough
the world will be your oyster and you will become it's pearl.
I would have like to have seen Liberace stand for Presidential Office.
His smile would have ensured his election.
And who knows where the election would have got his dentist?.

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

were said to live for 120 years
and 950 years, respectively.
The calendar used to measure
their lifespans remains unknown.
But for the women, children
and livestock detained
under their protective patriarchy,
ceaselessly being dragged
back and forth across the desert,
the time surely felt much longer.

Monday, 2 January 2012

for the want of something sure in which to trust,
is but a short journey, the steps of which,
once taken, are impossible to retrace.
Though many try to get around that impossibility
by going round in circles, created around their loss of belief.

Sunday, 1 January 2012

is the set of books that seeks to prove
that grumpiness needs to exist and must be loved.
But for faith in grumpiness to be sustained
it first has to be embodied,
and then hardened,
and then tenderized all over again.

The terrain that gave birth
to The Old Testament experience,
is like the stories themselves, spare
difficult to appease, and very unforgiving.